Literary journals and book series as agents of consecration: Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka in the Italian literary field (1908-1938)

If “texts circulate without their contexts” (Bourdieu 1999), how can a translated author acquire symbolic capital in a new literary field? A very significant agent of consecration can be found in literary journals and book series that, according to their own position in the field of reception, may have an interest in including some foreign authors in their repertoire, so sharing and potentially increasing their respective symbolic capitals. By discussing the case of Thomas Mann’s and Franz Kafka’s Italian trajectories and the development of the Italian literary field in the first decades of the 20th century, this paper proposes a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between translated literature and national literary history, based on the experience of the research project LTit (www.ltit.it).